


A Dog and His Boy

by onethingconstant



Series: Agent Carter Forever [5]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Comics), Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Cosmo the Spacedog - Freeform, Dogs, Gen, Grieving Tony Stark, Hopeful Ending, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Nebula Needs a Hug, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Telepathy, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony needs Space Google, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Why is there not more Cosmo fic, makes sense if you read the Abnett/Lanning GOTG comics, rehire James Gunn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 03:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17195603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onethingconstant/pseuds/onethingconstant
Summary: Tony Stark and Nebula are limping back to Earth from Titan. They stop to refuel. Tony is not good at staying on the ship. Tony is not coping with everything that's happened.Tony makes a friend.





	A Dog and His Boy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yaaurens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yaaurens/gifts).



> Happy (slightly belated) Christmas to my beloved genius billionaire playboy philanthropist godson, yaaurens. Consider this your gift, sitting under the tree with a bow, wagging its tail in delight as it sees you.

“Stay in the ship,” Cookie Monster snarled.

Tony Stark flicked a sarcastic little finger-salute at her, and went back to poking at what he was pretty sure was an honest-to-Turing tricorder, holy shit, except it projected so many different streams of glowing unreadable alien data into the air that it had to be at least a kilocorder. He didn't understand any of it yet, but the datastream accelerated when he pointed the sensor end at himself, and he had six doctorates, so how hard could it be to figure out?

Cookie Monster growled. 

Tony started to hum. He hummed the first tune that came to mind, which happened to be “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”. Cookie Monster seemed like she'd appreciate anybody who could rhyme “quickening” with “strychnine”. 

Cookie Monster growled more loudly, turned on her half-metal heel, and stalked out. 

Tony stopped humming and listened until he heard the rear hatch slam shut. Then he stood up and crept toward the belly hatch. 

Cookie Monster really should know better by now. He'd given her a different ridiculous name every day of their slow, torturous journey from Titan. Cookie Monster. Grover. Sully. Blue's Clues. Braveheart. If he ever remembered the name of the naked blue guy from that godawful Zack Snyder movie, it was going on the list. Damn the lack of Space Google. 

He knew Cookie Monster's name. He just wasn't going to use it until she stopped calling him “Terran”. And she really should have realized by now that he wasn't going to take orders from her. Maybe she didn't have sarcasm on her home planet. Maybe there were some social cues she was missing. Either way, there was no way he was going to stay put. 

Not when there was a _spaceport_ outside. 

Tony poked at the hatch release until the floor of the ship clanked open, then stepped into the gap and dropped the last couple of meters to the ground. The smell of ammonia smacked him in the face as he landed, and he gagged, suddenly remembering a couple of cleaning binges from his childhood.

_Now, Master Anthony, we'll just tidy up the evidence before your father gets home, and he'll be none the wiser._

_I dunno, Mister Jarvis, what're we gonna do about the scorch marks?_

_Mister Stark hasn't yet noticed the aroma of fresh paint. With any luck, he'll assume I was covering up the evidence of_ his _misadventures._

_Really? Dad makes mistakes too?_

_Of course he does. Why ever would you think he doesn't?_

_He always says his only one was me._

Tony shook his head and tried to breathe through his mouth. Good old Jarvis, always looking out for him. Tony wondered what the guy would think if he'd known alien refueling stations in the depths of interstellar space smelled like ammonia compounds.

 _Probably_ , he thought, looking around, _he'd think they needed a wash._

Tony set a mental timer for ten minutes. If the last two refueling stops were any indication, Cookie Monster would need anywhere between twenty minutes and two hours to finish negotiating a price for the fuel they needed and return to the ship to prowl and glower and generally maintain a low boil as the ship's tanks were replenished. That meant a ten-minute jaunt through the working spaceport _(!!!!)_ and then back to the ship, with Cookie Monster none the wiser. Plenty of time to pick up a few ideas he could reverse-engineer, casually revolutionize human spacefaring. Make sure he never got stranded on an alien planet again no matter _what_ fell out of the sky. Make sure that he never—

_Mister Stark, I don't feel so good..._

Tony shook his head hard and picked up the pace. _Don't think about it._ He was doing very well at not thinking about it, mostly. Once he got back to a planet with therapists and alcohol and Pepper _(only a fifty-fifty chance of that—goddammit, DON'T THINK ABOUT IT—)_ , he could have a nice little nervous breakdown. He'd put it on his calendar and everything. 

Cry later. Spaceport now. 

The ship's berth was a concrete bowl, more or less, open to the starry sky and a concrete tunnel through one side and not much else. No interesting aliens or tech in the bowl. He headed into the tunnel. From the far end, he could hear the distant _rooba-rooba-rooba_ of voices and the drone of engines and more than a few noises that wouldn't have been out of place at either a zoo or a chainsaw festival. 

He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, hoping he wouldn't be too tempted to touch anything. There was a month's worth of spaceflight left between him and hand sanitizer, after all. 

He emerged from the tunnel into a bigger cross-corridor and stopped dead. 

The spaceport had...everything. And it was all filthy. 

Most of the life-forms walking around were bipedal, but he saw a few four- and six-legged numbers crawling and scuttling past. A lot of them got around on two legs, which was just _stupid_ , honestly, why would evolution converge on bipedal locomotion, this wasn't fucking _Star Wars_. But nobody had consulted him about the abundance of fur, feathers, scales, and leathery skin on display. Or the weird elephant-on-stilts thing that drifted by like a dirigible on a string. There were spacesuits and uniforms aplenty, in every imaginable color and material, and more than a few old-fashioned glass bubble helmets, which—why? Again, disappointing. He'd expected more of the universe. 

But it was the _machines_ that had his attention. There were plenty of what looked like basic maintenance robots—little rolling boxes, some with arms and some without, trundling along the corridor on mysterious tasks. There were some smaller units, about the size of volleyballs, floating above the heads of the crowd, all blinking lights and whirling metal rings. Tony wondered how they stayed aloft. Not repulsors. Antigravity? He wondered if anyone would miss one if he just jumped for it –

No. No stealing things. This was Prime Directive territory. No stealing alien technology. No mucking around with anything he found here. This was strictly an observation mission. There was no telling what the flying 'bots would do to him, anyway. Carry him off to who knows where, probably. 

He flipped a mental coin, turned left, and headed off down the corridor. 

His skin crawled faster than he could walk. Dammit, this was why he lived in mansions and towers. He didn't _like_ people. They didn't make _sense_ , and they were _loud_ , and they _smelled_ , and they all _wanted things_ —

_London was enormous, and the warren of streets was as good as being lost in a maze. Everywhere he turned, there were strange faces hovering above his head, alien languages coming out of hostile mouths. He ran._

_There had to be a safe place somewhere. A machine shop. A lab. Someplace with more wires than human beings. He would be safe there. It wouldn't matter what his dad had said—wouldn't matter what he'd broken now—wouldn't matter that he didn't understand what people meant—_

_“Tony?”_

_He ducked into the first alley he came to and pressed up against the wall, breathing quick and shallow. He could do this. Nobody would miss him._

_“Tony, don't make me come in there.”_

_He knew that voice. He squeezed his eyes shut._

_“Oh, darling.”_

_He opened his eyes. Two brown eyes looked back at him, framed with delicate lines and bold mascara._

_“Darling, what happened?” Aunt Peggy asked him._

_Tony said nothing, only flung himself at her and buried his face in her neck. She smelled of cordite and her favorite perfume, as always. She wrapped her arms around him and rubbed his back as he sobbed in silence._

_“You weren't easy to find, you know,” she said into his hair, with a lightness in her voice that almost didn't sound forced. “You're becoming quite the little agent. Soon you'll be giving your old aunt a run for her money.”_

_Tony took a shuddering breath._

_“You know, a successful evasion like this deserves a reward. How about a day at the cinema? There's a new film I think you'll love. It's full of robots with a_ lot _of personality.”_

_Slowly, Tony lifted his head from her shoulder._

_“There's a good lad. Come along, then. Let's see this_ Star Wars _thing.”_

Tony took a deep breath and walked faster. There was no Aunt Peggy here, and there never would be again. She was dead, and he hadn't even been able to go to her funeral because of the Accords negotiations and of goddamn _course_ Rogers had been one of her pallbearers when it should have been _him_ —

_Don't think about it!_

_[You are not thinkink much, comrade.]_

Tony stopped short. He'd heard that. In _English_. Months in space with nobody but Cookie Monster speaking his language (she said she had a universal translator implant but honestly _what even_ ) and now he'd just … heard words he knew. Inside his head, but _not in his head voice_. 

In a Russian accent so cartoonishly thick he was pretty sure the next thing the voice said was going to include the phrase _moose and squirrel_. 

_[Squirrel? You are findink squirrel here? Cosmo has not seen squirrel in dog's age!]_

Tony did a quick little twirl, looking around for the source of the voice. Which, not smart, obviously dealing with a telepath of some kind, but hey, it was worth a shot. Maybe it was a line-of-sight telepath...

_[Cosmo is not needink line of sight! What are you takink Cosmo for?]_

“Who's _speaking?_ ” Tony muttered. If there was another tiny Californian in his ear or something, he was gonna blow this place up. 

_[Is Cosmo. Comrade—ehh, Stark—is beink from Earth, yes?]_

“God, is everybody in space secretly from Missouri?” Tony grumbled. “Yeah, I'm from Earth, so what? You got a problem with Earthlings?”

_[Not at all, Comrade Stark. Cosmo is happy to be findink someone from home!]_

“Home, huh? Guess this is where all the displaced humans hang out.” Tony looked wildly around. 

_[Cosmo is from Earth, comrade. Is not to say Cosmo is beink_ human _.]_

Tony went very still, all of a sudden, as ice ran down his spine. He was abruptly, acutely aware of how vulnerable he was, out in the open like this. No armor. No weapons, except his brain. And this … Cosmo … probably had an edge in the cerebral arms race anyway. Tony certainly couldn't beam messages directly into other people's heads. Cosmo seemed pretty used to it. 

_Russian accent_ , he thought. _How does somebody have an accent when they're thinking?_

_[Russian is beink Cosmo's first language, Comrade.]_

Tony wanted to laugh hysterically. _Eat your heart out,_ Arrival. First independent confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and he was going to die in space before he could tell anybody about it. 

_[Comrade Stark is ill? Cosmo wants to help!]_

Tony tried not to think about all the bizarre rumors he'd heard about Soviet and Russian experimentation over the decades. Even the stuff on the _record_ was weird, and the whispers were weirder. Cosmo could be damn near anything. Maybe Ivanov had managed to breed those humanzees after all...

_[Do not insult Cosmo.]_

“You don't wanna be insulted, stay out of my brain!” Tony snapped. 

There was a long, internal silence. Even his usual mental background hum was quiet. Tony squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to breathe slowly. Quiet was bad. Quiet was time to _think_...

_[...Let Cosmo show you.]_

_He was nine years old, his eyes hot with tears. “But he's my friend!”_

_“Don't be a child, Anthony. He's a stray, and you don't know where he's been. He smells terrible! I'll get you a better one. Purebred, special order.”_

_“I don't want a better one! I want_ him! _”_

 _The dog sat at his feet, cringing back against his shins as if aware he was being discussed. Even Tony would admit to himself that the animal's shaggy black-and-white fur smelled like hot garbage. But then, he'd been_ living _in garbage. He crouched down in defiance and threw his arms around the dog's neck. The dog licked his face._

_“Son, you've only known him for a day. He could have diseases—”_

_“He does_ not! _You left me here, you've got diseases!”_

 _“Leaving you at a summer house with Jarvis for the day isn't_ leaving _you, kid. Cut the waterworks and let go of that filthy thing.”_

_“I'll give'im a bath! Jarvis'll help!”_

_“Sir, if I might interject—”_

_“Jarvis, I don't wanna be indelicate, but you're not the father here.”_

_“Sir—”_

_“Anthony. Leave the dog. Get in the car.”_

_Tony buried his face in the sticking fur. The dog made a worried sound deep in his chest. His tail thumped the ground._

_“Anthony. Don't make me count.”_

_Tony's fingers curled deeper into the fur._

_“One.”_

_The dog whined._

_“Two.”_

_Tony swallowed a sob._

_“Thr—”_

_“Sir. I have a solution.”_

_“Yeah, what?”_

_“I will remain here to prepare the house for the family's formal arrival next week. I will see that our friend Bucky here is washed, vaccinated, and found a suitable home.”_

_Tony sniffled. A shadow fell over him, and the gawky bulk of Jarvis crouched down beside him._

_“Master Anthony? Is that acceptable to you?”_

_Tony slowly lifted his head enough to lock eyes with Jarvis over Bucky's neck._

_Bucky's floppy ears twitched._

_Jarvis's expression was calm and kind. “He will be happy, young sir. I promise you that.”_

_The rest of it went unspoken:_ happier than he would be with us. __

_Tony nodded, and Bucky was gone from his arms._

In the present, Tony opened his eyes and wrinkled his nose at the stink of ammonia. 

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Let me see you.” 

There was a shift in the air, and slowly the passing crowd drifted apart until there was a clear passage from where Tony stood to an alcove a few meters down. He took a deep breath, and walked forward along the invisible path, letting aliens shift and weave around him as if they were unaware of his presence. He reached the alcove and stepped into its shadows.

_[Hello.]_

It was a dog, all right. Medium-sized, shaped vaguely like a retriever, though the dark russet fur looked a little more Irish Setter-ish. It stared up at him with enormous, soulful brown eyes, and its tail gave a hopeful thump on the concrete floor of the alcove. 

Also, it was wearing a spacesuit.

“What the actual hell,” Tony said, and realized he'd said it out loud. 

The dog's mouth dropped open in a doggy grin. _[Is good to be meetink you, Comrade Stark.]_

Tony dropped to one knee and peered at the dog's suit. It had been white, once, before all the dirt and grime of the galaxy had gotten all over it. He vaguely recognized the Cyrillic markings on it, and the red star on the upper left foreleg needed no introduction. 

_Just like Bucky. The_ other _Bucky._

There was what looked like a retractable bubble helmet, pulled back into itself so it was more of an E-collar. Only the dog's head, paws, and tail were exposed. That was weird; he knew dogs hated having their paws covered, but spacesuits weren't built for comfort anyway. And how had someone trained a dog to eliminate in the suit...?

Tony leaned close enough to examine the four Cyrillic letters on the front of the spacesuit. 

Cosmo licked his nose. 

Tony jerked back, sputtering, and collapsed onto his ass. 

Cosmo's grin widened, and he emitted a chuffing sound that might have been laughter. 

“Ugh.” Tony rubbed spit off his nose. “Yeah, yeah. Very funny. Okay. So. Soviet space … dog … thing is lost in space. What do you want from me, pal?”

Cosmo looked down.

“C'mon. You called me over here. My time is valuable.” 

Cosmo looked up at him from under heavy eyebrows. 

_[Cosmo would like … to be goink home?]_

Tony was silent for a moment. 

Then he said, “I dunno. You'd be better off finding another Timmy to your Lassie. I'm not—great,” he swallowed, “at keeping things alive.” The alcove spun for an instant, but he shook his head and forced the vertigo away. _Don't think about it._

_[Cosmo can take care of himself. Cosmo has done so for many years.]_

“Yeah? What do you need me for, then?”

_[Cosmo is lonely.]_

Tony let out a breath. “Wow. Okay. You are _seriously_ barking up the wrong tree here, Rin-Tin-Tin. I'm bad news to be around. For reference, please see—uh, _everyone_ I've ever been around.” 

Cosmo stared at him. 

Tony stared back.

*

Nebula stomped back to the ship in only slightly less of a rage than she'd left it. Flarking price-gougers. Just because half the life in the universe had disappeared, people were acting like it was the end of the world, and charging accordingly.

At least she'd only had to cut off a couple of minor body parts to get the ship fueled. Another week or so, and she'd be able to dump the Terran back on his miserable planet and see if, by some miracle, his fabled Avengers could really make a dent in Thanos. 

She didn't love her odds, but anything was better than letting her father continue to breathe. 

She stalked up the gangplank, cycled through the airlock, and strode into the main cabin to see what Stark had managed to disassemble in her absence. 

To her surprise, there were no open panels in the walls. No cracked-open scanners or tools in sight. 

Also, no Stark. 

“Terran?” Nebula growled. “What're you playing at?”

No answer. 

She prowled toward the berths in the back, her onboard computer scrolling useless sensor data past her left eye, until she found him. 

Stark was curled up on a bunk, unconscious. Stretched out beside him, motionless except for a pair of deep brown eyes that followed Nebula's every move as she approached, was a dog in a spacesuit. 

“What the actual hell?”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Poisoning Pigeons in the Park is the greatest song ever written. Fight me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY  
> 2\. Boris Badenov is a pseudo-Eastern Bloc spy from _The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle_. He is constantly trying to capture or destroy “moose and squirrel”.  
> 3\. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is, broadly, the hypothesis that language shapes thought to such a degree that concepts that cannot be communicated within a given language are difficult to think of for users of that language (or at least monolingual users). Essentially, if you can't say it, you almost can't think it … unless you learn another language. A fascinating examination of this concept (which is not exactly widely accepted in psychology anymore) as applied to human-extraterrestrial contact is the film _Arrival_ , which I totally recommend and would recommend even if it didn't star Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.  
> 4\. Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was a fucking weirdo. Google him.  
> 5\. Per Season 2 of _Agent Carter_ , Ana Jarvis is unable to conceive and therefore it is unlikely that Edwin Jarvis fathered any children who shared his DNA. Howard is exactly the kind of asshole to rub that in at the worst possible moment.  
> 6\. Bucky the dog is/was real, except I named him Charlie. And he was as sweet as he is here. I encountered him while visiting my grandparents, who lived near some scrubland where people often abandoned pet dogs. (This was before no-kill shelters were a thing, and some people considered it more humane to leave an unwanted dog “in the wild”.) I was not allowed to bring him home with me when we left, but my grandfather left water out for him for a few days until he figured out his playmate was gone and moved on (I hope) to enrich someone else's life. I named him Charlie after Charles McNider, a.k.a. the DC Comics character Doctor Mid-Nite, because his facial mask looked like Mid-Nite's, right down to the black around his eyes and a white moon on his forehead. I figured little Tony, raised on Captain America stories, would naturally name his canine sidekick Bucky.  
> 7\. I've decided that Infinity War will be the jumping-off point at which my Peggyverse spins into its own reality, so expect canon divergence as I see fit from here on out. Now that I've seen the Endgame trailer, I think it looks good and all, but I prefer a universe where Peggy Carter is central and now is as good a time as any to start. I may also throw in Daredevil, because fuck you, Netflix.  
> 8\. Believe it or not, Cosmo the Spacedog is ESSENTIAL to my plan to fix Infinity War.  
> 9\. Be my friend on Instagram (@onethingconstant) and Twitter (@onbearfeet). I post pictures of Bucky Bear and yell a lot. I'm thinking of getting a Pillowfort.


End file.
